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Brexlit British Literature and the European Project
Kristian Shaw
21st
Century Genre Fiction Series, Volume 4 London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021 Hardcover. ix + 256 p. ISBN 978-1350090835. £90
Reviewed by Vanessa Guignery École Normale Supérieure de Lyon Kristian
Shaw’s book examines how British contemporary writers have engaged with the
fractures and anxieties in British society, which were made more visible by the
Brexit referendum of 2016. He argues that “the referendum was not responsible
for dividing the UK, but merely revealed the inherent fissures already existing
within society” [viii] and analyses books published before and after the Brexit
campaign to show that British authors were exploring the issues and tensions
that led to the Leave vote long before the referendum, “from immigration and
working-class alienation, to fears surrounding the splintering British union
and the weakening of national sovereignty” [34]. Shifting away from the binary
opposition between cosmopolitanism (associated with the Remain vote) and
nationalism (attached to the Leave camp), Shaw insists on interrogating the multidimensionality
of the Brexit result by addressing the “complex intersections of race, class,
sovereignty and devolutionary developments” contained therein [1]. The term
“Brexlit”, which Kristian Shaw started using as early as 2016, as mentioned in
the acknowledgements, became known to the general public in July 2017 when Jon
Day published a (critical) piece entitled “BrexLit : The New Landscape of
British Fiction” in the Financial Times. Kristian Shaw, the author of Cosmopolitanism
in Twenty-First Century Fiction (2017), contributed a chapter entitled
“BrexLit” to Robert Eagleston’s collective volume Brexit and Literature : Critical and Cultural
Responses published by Routledge in 2018, and Brexlit is a larger development
of these first academic responses. The book asks in particular to
what extent literature can “help to make sense of political and social
realities” [3], and that of Brexit more specifically, by examining the work of around
one hundred British writers (mainly novelists, but also some short-story
writers, playwrights and poets). In addition to this great number of primary
sources, the 24-page long bibliography of secondary sources testifies to the
very solid critical, historical and theoretical background. In the
introduction, Shaw proposes to “read Brexit backwards” [2] by tracing
the origins of Euroscepticism in British politics since 1945. Over twenty-four
pages, he presents a very precise and useful chronology of the key political
events that preceded Brexit and which testify to “a prevailing
institutionalized Eurosceptic tradition within British politics” [4]. For
decades, politicians have insisted on Britain’s exceptionalism and the need to
preserve a British national identity and sovereignty, and they have striven to
privilege the Anglosphere (“a development of ties with Commonwealth nations” [7],
even when Britain’s imperial glory was declining) over European integration. From
Churchill (despite being an early advocate of European integration) who declared:
“We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked but not compromised. We are
interested and associated but not absorbed” [7], to Thatcher who initially
supported the UK’s membership but eventually became a vehement critic of Europe,
politicians have consistently shown evidence of Britain’s entrenched
Euroscepticism. Shaw adds that by not signing the Schengen Agreements which
aimed to establish a Europe without borders and allow for free movement between
European countries, Britain became “paradigmatic for its anti-immigrant
outlook” [15], a position which deepened after 2004 when ten Central and Eastern
States joined the EU, leading to an influx of Eastern Europeans. Far-right and
nationalist political parties placed even greater emphasis on the issue of
immigration after the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis which resulted in “an
immediate public desire to ‘Take Back Control’ of Britain’s external borders” [21].
Brexit was therefore perceived as a “return to the British exceptionalism of
the post-war year[s]”, with Britain and Europe being treated as “separate and
incompatible entities” [26]. Shaw’s solid historical
overview in the introduction paves the way for the five chapters that follow,
in which the author systematically establishes parallels between fictional
creations and the socio-economic and political situation in Britain. He
examines pre-Brexit Eurosceptic fictions that anticipate the thematic concerns of
more recent literature, including “the nostalgic appetite for (an admittedly
false) national heritage, anxieties surrounding cultural infiltration and a
mourning for the imperial past” [4], as well as literary texts which respond to
Britain’s exit from the EU or “engage with the subsequent sociocultural,
economic, racial or cosmopolitical consequences of Britain’s withdrawal” [4].
Each chapter analyses a few novels (or other literary genres) in detail but the
author also refers more briefly to many more works of fiction, which provide
interesting points of comparison (to the already impressive number of books
mentioned in this study, one could suggest adding Jonathan Coe’s 2013 novel Expo
58). The sub-sections of each chapter open with a well-chosen epigraph from
a variety of writers, intellectuals and critics, providing an illuminating
point of entry to the discussion that follows. The first
chapter, “An imperfect union : British Eurosceptic fictions”, focuses on
post-war literature which “recognized the early warning signs of Europhobic
antipathy” [27], from ambivalent reactions to Britain’s proposed entry into the
European Community in 1962, to negative perceptions of the implications of
European integration and the Common Market. The author notes that British
literature has mostly failed to engage with the European project and points to
the “history of Eurosceptic British fiction […] as authors addressed the
nation’s diminished post-war role on the world stage from a dominant player to
a disempowered European member state” [3]. The fictions analysed in the first
chapter therefore “capture an image of Britain as the recalcitrant European,
the belligerent neighbour, peering over the Channel with disdain at the
Continent” [58]. Shaw first refers to several prominent writers and
intellectuals who showed concern over the European project, such as C.S. Lewis,
Iris Murdoch, E.M. Forster, John Osborne or J.B. Priestley. He then delves
deeper into a few novels, for example Kingsley Amis’s I Like It Here [37],
whose protagonist suffers “from acute prejudice about abroad” [qtd. in Shaw :
37] and which critics have interpreted as “evidence of Amis’s own Europhobic
anxieties and sneering condescension towards the Continent” [38]. Shaw also
examines Angus Wilson’s The Old Men at the Zoo (1961) in which the zoo
“serves as a microcosmic analogy for British society” and provides a “nostalgic
vision of Britain’s imperial prestige” [41] as the nation is declining and
Europe is getting stronger. Malcolm Bradbury’s Rates of Exchange (1983)
is said to provide “a satirical and critically detached perspective on British
insularity” [51] while Tim Parks’s Europa (1997), inspired by real
events, offers “an oblique and sardonic commentary on the enlargement of the EU
post-Maastricht and its intrusive symbolic impact on British national
sovereignty” [51]. Shaw also evokes dystopic Eurosceptic political thrillers
from the mid-1990s onwards (Andrew Roberts’s The Aachen Memorandum
[1995], for instance) “which hammered home the message that the British
electorate had effectively been manipulated into accepting EU membership at the
behest of some pro-European quislings” [55]. In the second
chapter, entitled “This blessed plot : The English revolt”, the “English
revolt” is another name for Brexit since 15.2 million out of the 17.4 million
votes cast for Leave came from England (but not from London as explained in the
last chapter). Shaw therefore examines fictions which interrogate English (rather
than British) national identity and reflect on nostalgia and Paul Gilroy’s
concept of “postimperial melancholia”. Shaw recalls that the 1990s saw a
“heightened concern with the fate of England and Englishness” [62], which was
reflected in books predominantly written by white male authors (Simon Heffer’s Nor
Shall My Sword [1999] or Peter Ackroyd’s Albion [2002], for instance),
but then turns to novels in which nostalgia for a mythical (and inauthentic) English
past is approached ironically or parodically. This is the case of Kazuo
Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) or Julian Barnes’s England,
England (1998) in which a tycoon creates a theme park which encapsulates
the “Fifty Quintessences of Englishness” and forms what Pierre Nora has called
a “lieu de mémoire”, a social construction which is also “a static
narrative of national inauthenticity and cultural loss” [65]. Significantly,
the park does not bear witness to the recent multicultural transformations in
England but relies on what Eric Hobsbawm has named “invented traditions” [77].
Another example of a nostalgic celebration of an inauthentic English past is to
be found in James Hawes’s Speak for England (2005) in which a colony of
survivors from a 1950s English plane crash have continued to cherish an iconic (but
culturally narrow) vision of England which bears no relation to the actual
country. Shaw convincingly reads the novel through the prism of Fintan O’Toole’s
“zombie imperialism” which relies on “the reproduction of outdated imperial
paradigms and behaviours […] long after Britain’s global prestige has faded” [76],
and rightly argues that both Barnes’s and Hawes’s novels “deconstruct and
unsettle nostalgic stereotypes associated with the English national identity” [77]. The second
part of the chapter, which bears the subtitle “Muscular Englishness” turns to
“texts which anticipate the rise of English nationalism and its crucial impact
on the EU referendum” [30]. Among the books examined features Jez Butterworth’s
Jerusalem (2009), “a play about the hunger and anxieties of Englishness”
[79]. The main protagonist, an outsider living in the woods and facing
eviction, embodies a nostalgic and pastoral vision of England, who seemingly
anticipates the millions of disenfranchised and frustrated citizens who cast a
protest anti-establishment vote in 2016. John King’s football-focused novels (which
include The Football Factory [1996] and England Away
[1998]) also capture “this festering anger towards political elites” [81] and
the author’s own anxieties regarding European integration. King and other writers
such as Paul Kingsnorth and members of the network “Artists for Brexit” are
however a minority among “the predominantly Europhilic chorus of British
authors in the twenty-first century” [84]. Shaw then focuses on Anthony
Cartwright’s realist narratives of working-class life, Heartland (2009)
and Iron Towns (2016), which “detail the subtle and insidious forging of
a resurgent English nationalism within the deindustrialized landscape of the
Black Country” [84], a territory marked by political disenfranchisement and
socioeconomic precarity. While the far-right extremism of the BNP drew
sympathetic voters among the marginalized working class in the late 2000s, UKIP
later exploited the resentment of a disillusioned electorate. The last section
of the second chapter turns to novels which are set in the past but speak to
the contemporary moment. For instance, the “social schisms and sense of
national declension” faced by eighteenth-century itinerant labourers who erect
protective shields against foreign influence in Ben Myers’s The Gallows Pole
(2017) find echoes in present-day England. In The Wake (2014), a “eulogy
to a lost, innate Englishness” [92], Paul Kingsnorth, a Leave supporter
labelled “the Bard of the Brexiteers”, parallels the struggles of a
Lincolnshire farmer against Norman conquest with British resistance to the
incursions of the EU. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015), set in a
post-Arthurian Britain, “serves as an urgent parable for Brexit Britain” [93]
in its deconstruction of foundational myths. Shaw proposes an interesting
parallel between the mist of forgetfulness in The Buried Giant, which
prevents the eruption of bloodshed between the Britons and the Saxons but can
no longer do so once buried memories of former tensions are recovered, and the
stability that was originally offered by the EU but which the Brexit has dismantled,
reawakening divergences. The third
chapter, “The disunited kingdom : Politics of devolution”, turns to the
impact of Brexit on the relations between England on the one hand and Wales, Scotland
and Northern Ireland on the other as the EU referendum “reopened old wounds and
accelerated unresolved grievances” [101]. This chapter devotes more attention
to the examination of the historical differences between the four nations and
the political situation of each than to their respective literature proper,
maybe because, as argued by Shaw, the literary response to Brexit by Welsh,
Scottish and Northern-Irish writers has been relatively muted [120]. The first
section focuses on Wales, “the only devolved nation to vote Leave in clear
defiance of their pro-Remain political class” [102], and Shaw traces the
factors that stimulated this vote (which probably reflected a rejection of the
establishment rather than the EU) by analysing a few post-devolutionary Welsh
fictions. The title of the section, “The Welsh disease” is borrowed from Niall
Griffiths’s novel Sheepshagger (2001) which exposes the apathy of the
Welsh, considered “incapable of political autonomy and trapped in a state of
colonial dependency” [104]: “the Irish kill each other, the Scots kill
themselves, an us, all we do is kill time” [qtd in Shaw : 104]. Shaw also examines
John Osborne’s Ten Million Stars Are Burning (2018), an account of the
build-up to the failed 1979 Welsh devolution referendum and its aftermath, which
shows Wales exposed to the power plays of Westminster. As mentioned in the
novel, “London is the great enemy of Wales, not Europe” [qtd in Shaw : 109]. In Scotland (where
74.3% voted in favour of devolution in 1997, and 62% in favour of remaining in
the EU in 2016), Brexit exacerbated the divergences with England and
strengthened support for enhanced devolution and independence movements. Shaw argues
that Scottish writers have failed to respond to Brexit because they are more
engaged with narrativizing devolution and envisaging independence (despite its
rejection in the 2014 independence referendum or indyref). For instance, Sarah
Hall’s The Wolf Border (2015) dissects the troubled union between
England and Scotland, and imagines a counter-factual future where Scotland
achieves its independence. On the other hand, Fiona Shaw’s Outwalkers (2018),
one of the first YA post-Brexit novels, “depicts a dystopic post-Brexit England
of the near-future which has ostensibly terminated its relations with
continental Europe and erected the New Wall” [122]. While Ali Smith’s Autumn
(2016) and Winter (2017) had an Anglocentric focus, Spring (2019)
comments on “Scotland’s troubled and ambivalent place within the British
constellation” [123]. Hall, Shaw and Smith all defy prevailing English
political discourses regarding immigration and celebrate alterity and
hybridity. In the section
on Northern Ireland (where 55.8% voted Remain despite this constituent nation being
overlooked during the referendum debate), Shaw notes that the impact of the EU
referendum on Northern Ireland has to be examined through the prism of the
history of the Troubles. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and joint EU
membership guaranteed an open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic
of Ireland, which Brexit has now imperilled. Shaws refers to several Northern
Irish plays which interrogate the legacy of the Troubles and the spectre of
their reawakening (Abbie Spallen’s Lally the Scut [2015] and Jez
Butterworth’s The Ferryman [2017]), as well as “psychogeographical
responses to the potential effects of Brexit on the borderlands” [131] by Glen
Patterson or Colm Tóibín, Siobhán Campbell’s poetry collection Heat
Signature (2017), and Anna Burns’s Booker winning novel, Milkman (2018).
If the Irish border and Scottish independence have attracted most media
attention after Brexit, Shaw points to the neglect of Gibraltar, Britain’s
forgotten partner which overwhelmingly voted Remain (95,9%), and refers to M.G.
Sanchez’s short-story collection Crossed Lines (2019) which portrays
characters who commute to work across the border on a daily basis. The fourth
chapter, “Fortress Britain : The great immigration debate”, includes a
discussion of anti-immigration legislations and evaluates the impact of the 2015
Syrian refugee crisis on the Brexit vote. A first section (“Opening the door?”)
focuses on novels which deal with economic migration from Eastern Europe (Rose
Tremain’s The Road Home [2007]), Marina Lewycka’s Two Caravans
[2007] and John Lanchester’s Capital [2012]) and a second section (“Closing
the door?”) turns to short stories dealing with the aftermath of the forced
migrations of refugees (Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes’s collection Breach
[2016] and the Refugee Tales volumes [2016-19], which “formulate a
politics of dissensus and confront the nation’s hostile approach to immigration
and the practice of indefinite detention” [157]). While Shaw points to “the
power of the short story as an appropriate form in capturing the liminality of
those individuals excluded from the national frame” [160], he also examines
novels which challenge European border policies such as Hari Kunzru’s Transmission
(2004) and Red Pill (2020), or Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017).
Drawing from John Lanchester’s novel The Wall (2019), he argues that
“post-Brexit fiction demonstrates a movement away from pre-Brexit Eurosceptic
fiction via a more focused and purposeful critique of cultural insularity” [164]. In the fifth
chapter, “L’espirit [sic] de L’escalier : Post-Brexit fictions”,
Shaw examines what he calls the “first wave” [168] of post-referendum
fictions and “the presence of post-truth rhetoric and political whiteness in
recent fictions” [33]. Various literary genres are addressed: caustic
autofictions like Rachel Cusk’s Kudos (2018) and Olivia Laing’s Crudo
(2018), political thrillers by Andrew Marr and Stanley Johnson, Ian McEwan’s
Swiftian anti-Brexit satire, Cockroach (2019), Douglas Board’s darkly
comic novel Time of Lies (2017) or Sam Byers’s dystopic novel Perfidious
Albion (2018), which both expose the unnuanced rhetoric of populism. In
“Mind the gap : London and the rest”, Shaw highlights the growing disconnection
between London and the rest of the country, which was confirmed by the
referendum in which most London boroughs voted Remain. After quoting from Zadie
Smith’s article “Fences : A Brexit Diary” (2016), her novella The
Embassy of Cambodia (2013) and her short story “Lazy River” (2019), all of which
register the social rifts in Britain before and after the referendum, he turns
to post-Brexit London fictions which evoke the cultural divide between London
and other regions. This is the case of Linda Grant’s A Stranger City (2019),
Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land (2017) and Anthony Cartwright’s
aptly-named The Cut (2017), a novel commissioned by Peirene Press “to
provide a direct response to the vote” [183]. Shaw argues that that the
referendum was one on the state of the nation rather than its fate
[189] and this has given writers an opportunity to revive the
state-of-the-nation novel (as in Jonathan Coe’s Middle England [2018]).
In the last section, “Brocken spectres of the past”, Shaw turns to novels which
examine “the weight of British history on contemporary paradigms of national
identity”, focusing on missing persons as in Adam Thorpe’s Missing Fay (2017)
and Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (2017), or on the haunting presence of
the past in the present as in Melissa Harrison’s All Among Barley (2018),
Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (2018) or Niall Griffiths’s Broken Ghost (2019).
The chapter ends with an analysis of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, works of
political allegory which “indicate the ways by which novels can be socially and
politically transformative” [212]. Brexlit is
as much a well-researched book about Britain in Europe (from a political,
institutional, economic and social perspective) as an extensive study of
British literature and the European project from the mid-twentieth century to the
present moment. The detailed developments on history and context are very
useful for understanding the motivations for the Leave vote and the background
to the novels, short stories, plays and poems examined. The book is a very
solid contribution to the emerging field of Brexlit literature.
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